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Here I will use “conservative” loosely to refer to the general “personal responsibility” and “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” attitudes the American right might generally support.

My foray into privilege theory has led me to ask myself what some of its implications for direct action are. That is, given what we know about privilege, and assuming that we care about people who are underprivileged, what should we do about it?

We begin again with the framework of privilege I discuss in my “Formalizing Privilege” article: that privilege is the combination of genetic and environmental factors that cause one’s success/satisfaction/power in life. Using this definition, we ask ourselves what we can do to alleviate the plight of the underprivileged. This article is not meant to be the end of this conversation, but merely an observation that might have otherwise gone unnoticed.

One of the central questions in this discussion is which privilege is the “most important one.” One way we can study this topic, as with everything else in science, is to vary a single variable while holding all other ones fixed. That is, we vary one privilege and we fix all others and observe the outcome. For example, if we’re interested in how important race is (on the margin), we take people who are identical in all ways except for in their race and we see how their lives turn out.

This analysis is difficult to perform because we generally do not have people who are identical except for one characteristic, and the origins of various privileges can be very difficult to notice (and are often unobservable, especially given our current data sets). Still, I wish to present one case study and discuss its implications: that of Ben Carson, as I learned about him from the book Gifted Hands. I hope that the shortcomings of extrapolating from this data set of size one are kept starkly in mind, while the important lessons are also taken to heart.

Ben Carson grew up fairly underprivileged:

– He was a black child in Detroit

– His mother raised him and his brother (sometimes on three low-paying jobs) without his father, while at times away for psychiatric treatment

– His mother had married at 13 and had no more than a third grade education.

– His school environment was not conducive to growth and self-empowerment

– He was teased by his white classmates (and sometimes his teachers) and he at one point believed he was not smart enough to do well in school

I initially had chosen the phrase “as underprivileged as they come” to describe him, though in the spirit of accuracy I decided not to use it, since it’s probably always possible to be less privileged. Still, it comes close.

We know what ended up happening to Carson: he became one of the world’s leading neurosurgeons, and he was a pioneer in new types of brain surgeries. Given all his underprivileges, what gives?

It’s possible to attribute all of this to chance – Carson just happened to be lucky and all the steps that led to his eventual success were a stroke of luck. This is theoretically possible, but I don’t find it particularly compelling.

The other explanation is that he was able to overcome the negative aspects of his environment through the positive ones – most notably, his mother’s influence. His mother instilled in him the values of hard work and determination and always pushed him to give his best. I would give a longer description of all of the values she stressed, but it would likely be variations on the main theme of hard work, so I won’t insult the reader’s intelligence by trying to influence him or her by repetition. Instead, let’s look at what conclusions we can draw.

It appears, at least in this case, that the values instilled in a person are so strong that they may very well overpower all other external underprivileges (which in Carson’s case were many – being a poor, black kid in Detroit under a single mother who had psychiatric problems and had to raise two children). Naturally, it’s unreasonable to expect that all kids who have these influences can become as successful as Ben Carson. But Carson’s story is an interesting case study where we have a mix of severe underprivileges that are counteracted by the value of hard work.

The “policy” recommendation here becomes apparent: teach kids “conservative” values that are traditionally associated with the American right: work hard, keep your course, study in school, be responsible, and pull yourself up by your bootstraps. This can be implemented either culturally (through a shift in what individuals in society choose to teach their children) or governmentally (through government edicts to emphasize hard work and personal responsibility in school and propaganda to do the same outside of school).

What I’ve done here is Type 2 privilege checking, as defined in my original article, which seeks to understand causal pathways in society that lead to people’s success. That is, I checked Dr. Carson’s privilege to see how other people could emulate him, and his story is a testament to conservative values. Do I believe that these should become government policy? No – I don’t favor social manipulation by the government of any kind, though I personally find the ethic of hard work to be empowering myself. I merely point out the conclusion from checking Dr. Carson’s privilege: if we want underprivileged people to do better, one way to achieve this is a cultural shift to the right. Do I think we should do this? Irrelevant – it’s what privilege theory suggests, and that’s all I mean to do in this article: see another conclusion of privilege theory. Of course, this doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways to help underprivileged people – either governmental or voluntary. However, for people who actually care about helping the underprivileged, this is a strategy that can be put into action without relying on the power of government. As such, it might be much more realistic to implement – and increased effort on the margin would lead to greater marginal results.

It is a fairly common belief that secession is legitimate in cases where it is necessary to stop human rights abuses. There is a somewhat less common view that secession is legitimate if it is supported by a majority or supermajority of people in the seceding region, as long as it does not create human rights abuses in that area. (See, for instance, Christopher Wellman on the matter, and Ilya Somin’s discussion relating to Crimea.)

However, what about the possibility of secession creating human rights abuses in the country which a region is seceding from?

Here’s an example: suppose some of the more anti-slavery Northern states in the U.S. had seceded in the decades before the Civil War. (There was some support for this, since many Northerners viewed the Fugitive Slave Act and wars fought for the expansion of slavery as unjust.) Suppose then that it had swung the remainder of the U.S. in a pro-slavery direction. Perhaps some results could be the expansion of slavery into the West, or more strictly enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act in non-seceding free states.

Could one then argue that the seceding states have an obligation to stay in the Union and keep pro-slavery policies from taking hold?

My current thought is that, since it can be very difficult to predict the outcomes of any given secession, a seceding region should not be blamed for these kinds of issues occurring.

In the previous example, it’s also quite possible that the remaining U.S. would have difficulty expanding slavery into the West without Northern military support. It’s possible that the Fugitive Slave Act would be weaker, since escaping slaves would be closer to permanent safety. (Getting to, say, Wisconsin, is easier than going all the way to Canada.)

Nonetheless, it does seem like this question could pose some issues for deciding when secession is appropriate, both in mainstream and less-mainstream theories. Feel free to post your ideas in the comments.

Notably, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens used the phrase when describing his opposition to the Citizens United decision, which allowed corporations and other associations to make independent expenditures on political campaigns. Maryland State Senator Jamie Raskin even claimed that treating the spending of money as free speech would require that prostitution be protected as a form of free speech.

Frankly, the “money is speech” characterization is disingenuous. The point is not that spending money on things generally is a sign of one’s preferences and thereby a form of “free speech”. The point is that spending money on resources and labor directly used in the act of communication is protected.

For instance, most publishing companies are corporations. If a publishing company spends money from its general treasury to publish a book containing political advocacy, should that act be protected under the First Amendment? I would say so. In this case, the free speech rights of the authors would be at stake.

And yet this not was the view of the government in Citizens United (see this link, pp. 26-29). The case was later re-argued, and the government decided that there might be other reasons justifying a challenge to restrictions on book publishing (see this link, pp. 64-65), but the same basic argument still applies to broadcast media, which was the issue in Citizens United. Should a TV broadcaster be allowed to spend its general treasury funds on producing and distributing political content?

When the issue is phrased in terms of spending money on speech, rather than just spending money, it becomes clear that restricting political spending is, in fact, a form of censorship.

William Nordhaus is one of the top experts on the economics of climate change and for a long time has worked on his series of DICE models (Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy models) that examine how standard predictions of the effects of climate change on climate variables (such as global mean temperature) will impact the economy. His work is important because DICE is one of the three Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) of climate-economic interaction that the government’s Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon uses in its analysis of the impacts of climate change. In other words, DICE is one of the three models used to calculate the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC), which is meant to represent the damage caused by one additional ton of CO2 in the atmosphere. The SCC was devised so that the government could weigh different strategies to slow down CO2 emissions and (in theory) reject any that cost society more than the damage caused by the CO2 emissions they prevent. In this post I highlight a problem economist Robert Murphy had found in Nordhaus’s 1999 version of DICE and add an observation of my own. To be clear, Nordhaus has since updated his model, and the issue likely does not persist, though I have not yet read the 2013 DICE specifications.

A long time ago, I was reading Murphy’s 2009 article Rolling the DICE: William Nordhaus’s Dubious Case for a Carbon Tax, and I was struck by the section discussing the possible economic damages from low-risk catastrophic climate scenarios (such as the shutting down of the thermohaline circulation of heat and salt among the world’s oceans). These are, again, doomsday scenarios that scientists do not believe will happen, but to which they still assign a low probability of occurring. These numbers are needed to create the model’s damage function, which describes the loss of Gross World Product (GWP – also referred to as world GDP herein) due to increased temperatures. How did Nordhaus get his probabilities for these catastrophic scenarios? He relied on a survey of experts he published in 1994, worded as follows:

“Some people are concerned about a low-probability, high-consequence output of climate change. Assume by ‘high-consequence’ we mean a 25 percent loss of global income indefinitely, which is approximately the loss in output during the Great Depression. (a) What is the probability of such a high consequence outcome for scenario A, i.e., if the warming is 3 degrees C in 2090 as described above? (b) What is the probability of such a high consequence outcome for scenario B, i.e., if the warming is 6 degrees C in 2175 as described above? (c) What is the probability of such a high consequence outcome for scenario C, i.e., if the warming is 6 degrees in 2090 as described above?”

Yet the results from 1994 will not do in 1999, since Nordhaus claims that new research has placed increased emphasis on the possibility of these catastrophic events. What does he do, then? And this is where Murphy picks a fight with him. To cite Nordhaus,

“To reflect these growing concerns, we assume [that] the probability of a catastrophe with 2.5 C warming is double the estimated probability for a 3 C warming from the survey, that the probability associated with a 6 C warming is double the survey estimate, and that the percentage of global income lost in a catastrophe is 20 percent higher than the figure quoted in the survey.”

Murphy summarizes what has happened as follows:

“To restate the issue: Nordhaus in 1994 asked experts to estimate (among other things) the probability of global GDP loss of 25 percent in the event of 3.0 C warming […]. The surveyed experts gave him their answers, from which he computed the mean. By 1999, further research had made these scenarios seem more plausible or catastrophic. So Nordhaus and Boyer took the original average of probabilities reported by the experts, doubled it, and then assigned this new figure as the probability for a 30 percent loss of GDP rather than the 25 percent the experts had been told to consider, for a less significant warming of 2.5 C rather than the 3.0 C mentioned in the original survey. […] More recent research suggests that at least some of these catastrophic scenarios were false alarms”

Why does it matter that Nordhaus apparently arbitrarily took the results of the survey of experts, doubled their answers, and then used these as probabilities for a different change in temperature and a different economic impact? Nordhaus claims that a 2.5C temperature increase would result in a loss of 1.50 percent of world GDP. And yet, 1.02 percentage points of these 1.50 percent are due to the low-probability catastrophic scenarios discussed above. This means that 68% of all the economic damages are based on numbers that Nordhaus arbitrarily manipulated.

So far so good – this has been Murphy’s critique (which I consider strong enough of a challenge to the model’s results). Yet I decided to dig a little deeper and look at how the 1994 numbers were obtained in the first place. They come from Nordhaus’s 1994 paper “Expert Opinion on Climate Change” in the American Scientist. In this paper, Nordhaus asked 22 experts their opinions on various questions relating to the effects of climate change on the economy. Three refused to participate, and of the nineteen remaining, nine were a mixture of economists, four were other social scientists, five were natural scientists and engineers, and the last one was Nordhaus himself. Again, it must be emphasized that this is not a review of literature of studies attempting to calibrate damage functions to observed warming, or at least to come up with plausible costs for disasters whose workings are scientifically described. No – the study merely asked nineteen experts in the field what they thought of the question [1].

We need to stop and consider how difficult the scenarios posed are: For example, in scenario A, respondents are asked how likely it is to have a 25% drop in world GDP in the year 2090 if there is 3 C warming. In a simple survey, respondents are asked to tackle a problem worthy of the whole literature – they are expected to take into account immigration flows, capital accumulation, technological adaptation, and a variety of low-probability catastrophic events we know of (and even ones we have not yet even conceived of) through the year 2090. They’re expected to be able to model the complex dynamics of the global market, advancements in science, and the catastrophic events due to precisely 3 C of warming. Nordhaus mentions in several places that there is much disagreement even among these experts on the economic impacts of catastrophic events, as seen in the spread of guesses for his questions. He notes that

“[o]ne respondent suggested whimsically that it was hardly surprising, given that the economists know little about the intricate web of natural ecosystems, whereas scientists know equally little about the incredible adaptability of human economies.”

And yet this does not seem whimsical at all, but a fundamental flaw in the methodology of the study. Natural scientists know very little about modeling economies and the ability of economies to respond to shocks. Similarly, economists are not intimately aware of the details of the consequences of climate change. Let’s look at what it would take to give an answer for Scenario A. One would first need to decide on the probability of various catastrophic outcomes due to 3 C in 2090 (a difficult enough endeavor). Then, one would need to estimate the economic impact of each catastrophic outcome to see whether it makes the 25% cutoff. The ones that do are all added together and this resulting probability is given as the answer.

In this deconstruction of the problem, we can see why the “whimsical” comment of the respondent above is not so whimsical at all – the question requires one to answer two very difficult subquestions, where each is focused on an entirely different field – one on climatology, the other one on economics. Only when these two are combined can the answer given be fully informed. How can an economist accurately answer the first part of the question – on the probabilities of different known (and even unknown!) catastrophic events. How can a natural scientist adequately guess the economic damage due to a climate event? Not only this, but the respondents were asked to give their subjective probabilities to these catastrophic events without having conducted any studies on this specific question, but merely as a matter of opinion. Yes – expert, informed opinion, but no matter how much of an expert someone is, when giving a probability to a 25% reduction in GWP due to 3 C warming in the future of 2090, which has unknown adaptive technology, her best guess will still be a fairly uninformed guess. Some respondents do mention technology as the big unknown:

“What is missing most is an understanding of the role of technology, of how society will change as technology advances. If we had been concerned with global warming in the 1890s, it would have concerned transportation by horses rather than automobiles. It is impossible to contemplate what society will be like a century from now as technology changes.”

Another writes

“Technology will develop to adjust to and accommodate many of the climatic changes and even provide approaches to countering warming effects. However, projecting technological changes a century or two into the future is hazardous at best. All we can really say is that there will be technological changes and that as in the past they will probably offset adverse effects to some degree.”

I cite this not to dismiss concerns over warming, but to show just the enormity of the task the experts were asked to perform – “impossible” by the words of some of them (in the case of forecasting technological changes). A major rainstorm in the distant past would have done much more damage to the livelihood of the public than it would today, for example. Why? We have sturdier buildings. This shows that the damage by natural events depends on the technological progress of a society very strongly. Nordhous quotes one of the respondents, who shares my main concern:

“I must tell you that I marvel that economists are willing to make quantitative estimates of economic consequences of climate change where the only measures available are estimates of global surface average increases in temperature. As [one] who has spent his career worrying about the vagaries of the dynamics of the atmosphere, I marvel that they can translate a single global number, an extremely poor surrogate for a description of the climatic conditions, into quantitative estimates of impacts of global economic conditions.”

Combining this with Murphy’s point that Nordhaus simply decides to double the values acquired from the survey and use them as answers to a different question, Nordhaus’s model (and its policy implications) becomes dubious. To reiterate what has happened: Nordhaus created a model where two-thirds of the damages from climate change are estimated from a survey asking a mix of scientists and economists their subjective opinion on how likely it is for a 3 C increase in 2090 to cause a 25% drop in GWP given unforeseeable technology, unforeseeable geographical population spread, unforeseeable gradual adaptation, and unforeseeable economic conditions, averages the opinions of these people, some of whom point out the precariousness of asking experts to weigh in on issues they know little about, and then takes this average, doubles it, and uses it to represent the chance of a catastrophic event resulting in a different scenario – a 30% drop in GWP due to a 2.5 C increase. In this case, “unsubstantiated guesswork” might be putting it lightly.

Once again, Nordhaus has a 2013 DICE model out, which likely does not have the above fatal mistakes. I did not intend this post to make light of the danger of climate change (with which I am not well-acquainted, not being a climate scientist myself), but merely to show the importance of looking at assumptions in our models, especially when they have such large impacts on the results of the model – and when the world looks to you for guidance on the issue.

Notes:

[1] Here’s an analysis I would consider to be an honest attempt at such an endeavor: Say we’re trying to assess the damages due to an enormous rise in sea levels. We’d begin with a map of the inundated areas and assess the current property values. This amount would then get adjusted to account for possible appreciation in the housing market. Afterwards, we might try to set up a model of housing investment, price changes, and population growth and migration to look at how much the demand for housing would increase across the entire world, and, hence, how much a reduction of usable housing area would cost the economy. We’d also need to take into account adaptive behavior that some areas might take to prevent the damages from a sea level rise (walls?). And so on. And this is just for sea level rise! In short, the survey respondents were asked to create a general equilibrium model of everything in the world and extend its predictions out to the year 2090 – a task worthy of a team of hundreds of economists and years of planning and debate (and even then, the model would still fall short).

Last month I decided to play soccer for the first time in too long and so I went out to the field near the gym to join a pickup game. I played there for roughly two hours (with a superbly diverse group, I must say), and then I took a break at the university library while waiting for 10 PM to come around so I could go join some friends to play even more soccer.

After the second round of soccer, I was thoroughly worn out. I had been kicked in the shins and stepped on a few times too many, and I hadn’t had to run so quickly and dynamically in years. I got on the bus to go back to my place, feeling like a wet rag.

While I was on the bus, waiting for it to leave the bus stop, a disabled black woman rolled up to the bus in her motorized wheelchair. The bus was lowered for her, the platform extended, and she got on, went to the handicapped spot in the bus, and waited for the driver to strap her chair in place.

After I noticed her and the events surrounding her, I looked away and kept thinking my own thoughts, one of which was particularly loud and consisted of my mind screaming at me how tired I was. But then, I looked again at the disabled woman and put my experience in perspective:

– Yes, I was tired, but at least I had the pleasure of playing for so long, while she did not.

– Yes, I was in pain and would likely be sore for a very long time (my knee was in fact weak for the next few days), but no more than a week later I would surely be fine again and up for more high-speed games, while she would not.

– Yes, I felt like a wet rag, but she probably had to suffer from impaired mobility for the rest of her life and often had to rely on help for some of the most basic tasks in her life, which surely can’t be a great elixir for one’s self-esteem.

In short, I checked my privilege. And it was empowering.

Suddenly, the pain and the weariness did not seem so great. Suddenly, I focused on the positives, on the fun I had just had, and on the fun I would have in the future – and even on how I would improve my game in the future.

This led me to come up with the theme for the present article. While privilege theorists believe that privilege checking can help lead to a more just society by helping people reconsider their assumptions and positions of power as they interact with others in social spaces, it’s conceivable that the result could be the opposite. If a privileged person checks their privilege and realizes they have no reason to feel discouraged in their current position, this could prompt them to continue to enjoy their privileges over other people.

In other words, checking one’s privilege could, for some people, be translated as “hey – remember that you have all of this privilege!” This, in turn, could result in them saying “hey – I do! Thanks! I feel a lot better!”

Next time you feel down – check your privilege. You’ll feel a lot better.

My article on formalizing privilege has received a tiny bit of attention in social media (since I sent it around to a few people) and someone graciously decided to message me with his thoughts and later went on to make a video response to my article:

I’d like to begin by thanking Philluhp for taking the time to both read my article and to make a respectful video (twice!) to voice his views on the matter, which can be summarized as follows:

_________

– When we, as social justice warriors, talk about privilege, we are not talking merely about an individual advantage someone has

– We’re talking about an advantage that a group has due to beliefs or cultural practices that results in social stratification/hierarchies/put people in positions of power over others

– We’re also talking about psychological authority

– Systemic privileges are advantages that certain groups have over each other and over other groups

– We’re talking about ending the beliefs that create these outcomes

– We don’t care about individual/personal privilege

– If someone has genetics that make him 6 foot 8, have large hands, and like basketball, and he goes on to become a successful basketball player – we don’t care about that. By your [Michael’s] definition, he’s very privileged, but we don’t care. We don’t care that the environment he grew up in happened to value his traits.

– We are not talking about people who happened to get lucky with genetics and environment and they happened to coincide.

_________

The above are the main (and only) points Philluhp makes, and I took careful notes to not miss any of his thoughts and build a straw man against him. Still, I do have to admit that it was sometimes difficult to parse out his intention, and so I did the best to reconstruct his argument. Here is one example of an apparent contradiction in what he was saying:

Of course, we always give our discussion partners the benefit of the doubt in these cases and assume the best intention on their part.

Anyway, my thoughts:

Philluhp’s response doesn’t alter my analysis in any way, because it was already broad enough to encapsulate all of his points.

Philluhp’s main theme (which is likely one that any social justice warrior [1] would have brought up “against” me) is that privilege is “an advantage that a group has due to beliefs or cultural practices that results in social stratification/hierarchies/put people in positions of power over others.”

The fact that the privilege is a feature that pertains to a group instead of just an individual is not especially relevant if the outcome is the same. Not only this, but all group privilege is a type of individual privilege – each individual receives this privilege when he/she is part of a group. Furthermore, if many individuals have what Philluhp calls an “individual privilege,” then there is a group of people that has this advantage over other people, and hence it becomes a group privilege.

Does Philluhp not care about individual privilege because he does not think that these specific privileges create group advantages that are all thatlarge (like being naturally built in a way appropriate for basketball)? If so, then he’s ignoring a mainstay in feminist theory – interlocking privileges. Simply because 10 individual features by themselves are not very influential does not mean that when put together they will not have a significant impact. But even that ignores the point that simply because the greater power these individual privileges confer is not as great as other “class” privileges it does not mean that it’s not important to discuss it.

But I digress. The most important answer to Philluhp is: my analysis already takes into account class privileges/social stratification/hierarchies/putting people in positions of power over others. As he explains, my analysis is quite broad, and even by his definition of privilege it subsumes [2] the concept of privilege. I talk about both “individual” and “class” privileges (thought I doubt the distinction is in fact existent) because I address privilege as a thing that has the features that both individual and class privilege share. None of my analysis breaks down when you replace each instance of “privilege” with “systemic privilege” in my essay (and Philluhp has failed to point out why my analysis would break down). No part of my analysis said one’s privilege (as I defined it) may not be in part due to a prevailing social attitude. Here’s an analogy: Say I am writing a paper on why it’s impossible to just lift a book and leave it to float there by itself, and in my argument I say “all items are pulled toward the earth because of gravity. Therefore, if there is no other force to hold the item suspended, it will fall.” Someone responds, saying “aha – but you are wrong, my dear Michael! We are discussing the issue of books falling – not just ‘items’!” Well, yes, we are, but since “a book” is a generic particular [3] of “all items,” what is true for “all items” is true for “a book.”

Fundamentally, I think Philluhp’s argument is inconsistent. He states “We are not talking about people who happened to get lucky with genetics and environment and they happened to coincide.” And yet this is exactly what white privilege is, for example. A person happened to get lucky with genetics (being white) and environment (a society where whiteness is valued) and they happened to coincide. Yes, his environment’s liking for his whiteness is a systemic thing – this does not change the analysis.

Try another line of argumentation: Suppose all NBA players are wealthy or at least have a fairly large yearly income (my guess is that this does not strain the imagination). Suppose an NBA player walks into a soup kitchen, sits down, turns to the homeless man to his right, and starts complaining about how he can’t afford the mortgage on his third home and how his Lamborghini just broke down, etc. etc. I think that many people would think that a good “check your privilege” would be healthy for the basketball player right at that moment No? Well, suppose that the homeless man starts complaining back about how he’s got no home, how he’s in debt, how he’s got a mental illness, and how his friends all abandoned him. The basketball player, with a look of disgust, says “well, why don’t you just become a basketball player like me and make tons of money?” In this case, a “check your privilege” would definitely be required, since the basketball player is ignoring the pathways through which he achieved his success and is failing to realize that the homeless man likely cannot do the same. Aha – so we see that “privilege” is indeed a good word for the basketball player’s characteristics.

Moreover, take beauty privilege or thin privilege. Both of these have various causal “individual privileges” (by Philluhp’s verbiage) as their roots – whether this is genetics or how health-conscious a person’s parents are or how stressful a child’s environment was.

To summarize:

– Most importantly (and again, I cannot stress this enough) – my analysis already takes into account class privilege, because nothing I said is specific to “individual privilege.” Even if all of the following points are in fact wrong, this point by itself is enough to hold up my entire thesis. My original essay remains entirely true unless someone can show my analysis does not hold for class privilege.

– There is no useful distinction between individual and class privilege in my opinion. All class privileges are characteristics of individuals [4]. And all characteristics of individuals separate people into groups and determine their success/power/hierarchical relations.

– Even Philluhp’s “class privilege” is exactly what he said it’s not – “people who happened to get lucky with genetics and environment.” I repeat – all privilege is a mix of genetics and environment, including class privilege – to no lesser extent!

Notes:

[1] In my experience, “social justice warrior” is used somewhat derisively, but since Philluhp approached me using this terminology, I figured that it is a label accepted by the community.

[2] Subsume – to consider or include (an idea, term, proposition, etc.) as part of a more comprehensive one.

[3] A “proof by generic particular” as I learned it in Discrete Mathematics is a proof where you say “we have a category Y. Take any generic item y in that category. By virtue of being in Y, it satisfies conditions a, b, and c, from which we can deduce d, e, and f.” It’s relevant to this conversation because I said “take a generic type of privilege. By virtue of being in the group of privileges, we can deduce so and so from it.” Simply because the privilege can also be a specific type of privilege, it doesn’t invalidate things that are true for all privileges.

[4] Any students of economics reading this will appreciate here a mention of methodological individualism. If this means nothing to you, no worries.

David North has a post on his blog at the Center for Immigration Studies titled, “CIS Gets an Offer We Will Refuse from a Bangladeshi Organization”. He explains that a recruiting agency had emailed a foreign recruiting firm, offering to pay his organization for finding employment for a worker sponsored by their agency and arranging for a visa.

He then says that, “In any case, it is highly unattractive, and is an indication of how badly nonimmigrant workers are treated in such cases, and how attractive they can be to exploitative U.S. employers”.